Cambridge Review of International Affairs

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Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection

Jane Freedman

To cite this article: Jane Freedman (2010) Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection,
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:4, 589-607, DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2010.523820

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 Cambridge Review of International Affairs,
Volume 23, Number 4, December 2010

Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection

Jane Freedman
Universite de Paris 8

Abstract The issues of gender-related persecution and violence against women have
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been put onto the international agenda, largely thanks to lobbying by feminist NGOs and
transnational networks. There is a question, however, of how successfully this agenda-setting
has translated into effective policy-making and policies that will increase the protection of
women who are victims of gender-related persecution. One of the problems with policies to
support women refugees and asylum seekers lies in a failure of transmission of the goals of
gender sensitivity through all the various bureaux and representatives of a large bureaucratic
organization such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
For nearly twenty years, since the early 1990s, the UNHCR has identified refugee women as
a policy priority, and yet, despite this prioritization of concerns about women refugees and
gender issues in the asylum and refugee process, it could be argued that little progress has been
made in implementation of policies on refugee women. This article will examine the way in
which the concept of gender has been adopted within the UNHCR and the processes that have
been put in place to mainstream gender within refugee protection activities. How far has
mainstreaming managed to move policies to protect women beyond a mere focus on
vulnerable groups, and to integrate a gendered understanding of the global processes that
produce refugees, and of the protection needs of these refugees?

Introduction
The issues of gender-related persecution and violence against women have been put
onto the international agenda, largely thanks to lobbying by feminist non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational networks (Keck and Sikkink
1998; Joachim 2003). There is a question, however, of how successfully this agenda-
setting has translated into effective policy-making and policies that will increase the
protection of women who are victims of such gender-related persecution. This article
focuses on the implementation of policy in one particular area, that of the protection
of asylum seekers and refugees. It will ask how far the goals of protection against
gender-related persecution and violence have been translated into effective policies
and practice, with particular focus on the activities of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the main international organization
responsible for refugee protection. One of the problems with the policies to protect
asylum seekers and refugees from gender-related violence lies in a failure of
transmission of the goals of gender sensitivity through all the various bureaux and
representatives of a large bureaucratic organization such as the UNHCR. For nearly
twenty years, since the early 1990s, the UNHCR has identified refugee women

ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/10/04058919 q 2010 Centre of International Studies

DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2010.523820
 590 Jane Freedman

as a policy priority, yet, despite this prioritization of concerns with women refugees
and gender issues in the asylum and refugee process, implementation continues to
be slow and ad hoc (Baines 2004, 1). This article will examine the way in which the
concept of gender has been adopted within refugee protection activities, including
those of the UNHCR, and the processes that have been put in place to mainstream
gender within them. It will ask how far the adoption of gender mainstreaming as a
principle has managed to move policies to protect against gender-related persecution
beyond a mere focus on vulnerable groups, to integrate a gendered understanding
of the global processes that produce refugees and of the protection needs of asylum
seekers and refugees.
This article is based on research carried out between 2005 and 2009, including
interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in various European countries,
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employees of UNHCRincluding protection officers in national UNHCR offices

and employees at the UNHCR headquarters at Geneva1and representatives of
leading NGOs involved in asylum and refugee support activities. Data were
also gathered through participant observation in UNHCRs Age, Gender and
Mainstreaming Project carried out in France between 2008 and 2009. Data gathered
from interviews were analysed in conjunction with data gathered from analysis of
UNHCRs own policy documents concerning gender equality and the rights of
women refugees, and analysis of reports on UNHCRs gender equality strategies
produced by NGOs and partner organizations.

Putting gender on the map of refugee protection

For a long time, any consideration of gender issues was absent from discourse and
debate on refugees and asylum. This absence relates in part to the circumstances
surrounding the drafting and adoption of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status
of Refugees (Refugee Convention), which together with its 1967 protocol remains
the major international convention regulating the protection of refugees.2 The
Convention was negotiated primarily by the United States (US) and its European
allies, as most of the states of the new Eastern bloc boycotted the negotiations (with
the exception of Yugoslavia). As a result of this dominance by the US, the resulting
treaty was highly limited in its application and was mostly aimed at dealing with the
cases of people arriving in the West from one of the Soviet bloc countries. As Loescher
argues, The Convention was intended to be used by the Western states in dealing

1
Although these interviews were all carried out in Europe, the interviewees included
UNHCR employees who had previously worked in positions in refugee protection in
countries outside Europe. These interviewees were able to provide reflections on their
work in refugee camps, for example. Interviewees at UNHCR headquarters also included
those specifically involved in promoting gender-based refugee protection within the
organization.
2
The 1951 Convention is the only universal treaty that provides for the protection of
refugees; in those countries in which the Convention has not been ratified and adopted into
national legislation as the basis of asylum law, the UNHCR uses the Convention as the basis
for deciding refugee claims. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention on the
Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (Addis Ababa, September 1969), and the
Cartagena Declaration on Refugees (Cartagena, 1984) provide some elements of regional
refugee definition which are applicable to situations in Africa and South America,
respectively.
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 591

with arrivals from the East, and largely reflected the international politics of the early
Cold War era (Loescher 2001, 44). The refugee as perceived by the Convention was
thus an individual persecuted by a totalitarian regime because of his or her political
views or activism. Large groups of displaced people fleeing from international
conflicts or from civil wars were not envisaged as refugees at this point. These
limitations on the definition of a refugee continue to have important implications
today and create difficulties for many women in gaining refugee status. It can be
argued that the 1951 Refugee Convention, like other international human rights
conventions, was written from a male perspective and that the situations and
interests of women were ignored. Spijkerboer notes that during the negotiations
leading to the drafting of the Convention the relevance of gender was discussed only
once, when the Yugoslav delegate proposed that the words or sex should be
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included in article 3, which stipulates that the Convention shall be applied without
discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin. The suggestion was quickly
rejected, as it was considered that the equality of the sexes was a matter for national
legislation, and the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Van Heuven
Goedhart, remarked that he doubted strongly whether there would be any cases of
persecution on account of sex (Spijkerboer 2000, 1). These views may be seen as
typical of the time at which the Convention was written, when the questions of
gender equality and womens rights were far from the centre stage of politics, and
particularly of international politics. More seriously, the High Commissioners
remark that he could not envisage persecution on the grounds of sex seems to have
endured in many interpretations of the Convention, and the male model of rights on
which it was based has, in many cases, not been challenged in its implementation. As
Bunch maintains, the dominant definition of human rights and the mechanisms to
enforce them in the world today are ones that pertain primarily to the types of
violations that the men who first articulated the concept most feared (Bunch 1995,
13). Thus, violations and persecutions pertinent primarily to women are often left out
of the spectrum of those things considered valid reasons for granting refugee status.
The neglect of the issue of gender in the 1951 Refugee Convention can thus be seen
as an important factor leading to the failure to take into account gender-related
persecution and the protection of the needs of women asylum seekers and refugees.
Moreover, difficulties in mainstreaming gender in asylum and refugee policies and
practices can still in part be attributed to this limited definition and understanding of
who is a real refugee. The neglect of gender in refugee protection was also mirrored
in the lack of academic research on asylum and refugees which took gender seriously.
Indra describes how in early academic research on refugees gender was either not
mentioned at all or was considered just another variable like age or occupation . . .
Womens issues were still not well-publicized refugee problems, and so little
academic research on women was produced (Indra 1989, 3). In fact, gender was not
put on the agenda of refugee protection in any meaningful sense until the 1980s
(Hyndman 1998), on the basis of growing international pressure to take account
of questions particular to women refugees and asylum seekers. In particular,
campaigning by transnational networks of womens organizations put pressure on
the UNHCR to recognize the need to consider gender issues following growing
public awareness of gender-based violence and persecution against refugees. One
of the first signs of issues of gender in refugee crises becoming visible was during
the massive forced migrations from Southeast Asia in the early 1980s. The plight of
the boat people was reported worldwide, and particular attention was paid to the
 592 Jane Freedman

vulnerability of women on the boats, who were at risk of sexual violence and rape if
the boats were attacked by pirates. The international media transmitted eyewitness
reports and accounts of the experiences of those fleeing, many of which were similar
to the one below:
While all the men were confined to the hold of the refugee boat . . . some, if not all of
approximately fifteen to twenty women and young girls, who were kept in the cabin
of the boat were raped. The youngest of these girls was around twelve years old.
Soon afterwards, the pirates set the boat on fire with all the Vietnamese on board. In
the ensuing panic, the Vietnamese grabbed buoys, cans, and floats and plunged into
the sea. The crews of the pirate boats then used sticks to prevent them from clinging
to floating objects . . . Women and children were the first to perish. (Quoted in
Forbes-Martin 2004, 46)
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Other reports claimed that the boat people were being forced by the pirates to
choose young girls to offer to them in return for the lives of the rest of the
passengers on board (Forbes-Martin 2004). These types of reports highlighted the
vulnerability of women and girls and the prevalence of rape and sexual violence
used against those fleeing, putting pressure on the UNHCR to react by providing
added protection for these women and girls.
At the same time, it became more and more difficult to ignore women
refugees in other areas of the world, particularly because of the sheer numbers
of women in refugee camps,3 and because of practical questions relating to
the distribution of food and other aid. Models of aid distribution which took
the household as a unit of analysis came under question. The number of
woman-headed households in these camps meant that resource distribution
models based on a male head of household were unworkable (Hyndman 2000).
Women were often excluded from camp planning (Kreitzer 2002). Various issues
like these gradually entered the international consciousness and coalesced to
provide a focal point for the start of transnational activism in support of a more
gender-aware approach to refugee issues (Indra 1999), which gained momentum
at the World Conference on Women held in Nairobi in 1985. At the Nairobi
conference, hundreds of representatives from refugee womens associations
attended the parallel NGO forum. Following this conference an International
Working Group for Refugee Women was set up, creating a network of national
groups aiming to push the UNHCR to take action.
The UNHCR responded to this international pressure by appointing a senior
coordinator for refugee women in 1989. Baines recounts that when the first
woman to take up this post, Anne Howarth-Wiles, arrived in Geneva, she had a
rather cold welcome with few resources at her disposal and little enthusiasm
amongst her co-workers (Baines 2004, 44). In an interview with Baines, Howarth-
Wiles described her initial experiences, which are summarized as follows:
As soon as she arrived, it became obvious to her that most UNHCR staff were
reluctant to embrace a gender perspective. Most believed that international
refugee instruments and practices applied equally to men and women and were
therefore non-discriminatory. A policy on refugee women was considered

3
The actual number of women refugees globally is still a question that is open to
debate. Some over-inflated figures have been put forward, particularly in order to urge the
international community to action, as will be discussed below.
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 593

unnecessary (Baines 2004, 45). As argued below, interviews with UNHCR staff
today indicate that, although the organization has officially adopted gender
mainstreaming, this belief that international refugee conventions and instruments
are in fact non-discriminatory and that there is no need for separate actions for
men and women is still present amongst some staff (Freedman 2007).
Despite this initial reluctance to engage with issues of gender, a reluctance that
seems to have lasted among some UNHCR employees, the Senior Coordinator
managed to launch a campaign involving the development of a policy on refugee
women, together with training programmes to raise awareness of the issues involved
both inside and outside the UNHCR (Baines 2004). In the following years several key
policy documents on refugee women were produced, notably the Policy on refugee
women (UNHCR 1990), the Guidelines on the protection of refugee women (UNHCR 1991)
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and the Sexual violence against refugees: guidelines on prevention and response (UNHCR
1995). Initial policies and programmes focused on women refugees, rather than on
the relational issues of gender in refugee programmes, as seen from the titles and
contents of these guidelines (UNHCR 1991). This focus on women as a special or
separate group could be argued in some contexts to have further marginalized
women by targeting them as a separate group and so essentializing their difference
and ignoring the relational aspects of gender that affect both women and men.
By the end of the 1990s, the focus within the UNHCR was moving away from one
that was specifically on women, and more towards gender-based policies and
programmes (Womens Commission for Refugee Women and Children [WCRWC]
2007). This coincided with wider efforts amongst the international community to
move away from a Women in Development towards a Gender in Development
approach (Rathberger 2005), and to incorporate gender mainstreaming in all UN
operations. The UNHCR has adopted mainstreaming and announces that it intends
to incorporate a gender equality perspective into all of its activities (UNHCR 1999).
Mainstreaming is, however, still a contested concept and thus one that is notoriously
difficult to implement in practical policy and programme terms, as feminist critiques
have pointed out (Charlesworth 2005; Kuovo 2005; Rathberger 2005). In fact, as some
feminist critics have argued, the use of mainstreaming can be a way for institutions to
frame gender in a particular way, thus blunting the critical or transformative power
of gender analyses and approaches (Jahan 1996; Parisi 2008). Jahan distinguishes
between two types of gender mainstreamingintegrative or transformativewhere
the first merely adds gender into existing policy frameworks, whilst the second
transforms these frameworks and introduces new understandings (Jahan 1996). As
I will argue, the type of mainstreaming adopted by the UNHCR has been more of an
integrative approach, which has not fundamentally shifted understandings or
representations of refugees and asylum seekers and, in particular, has not moved
away from a discourse concerning the vulnerability of women. One of the particular
problems of mainstreaming, and the way it is implemented, may be argued to reside
in the specific interpretations of gender and of gender equality which give a narrow
definition of what this gender equality should entail (Charlesworth 2005). Whilst
feminists have contributed to an understanding of gender as a set of variable but
socially and culturally constructed characteristics (Tickner 2001, 15), and have
emphasized the need to consider gender as a relational concept that refers both to the
content of social relations and to the manner of their construction (Whitworth 1997),
understandings of gender within many mainstreaming projects still consider gender
 594 Jane Freedman

equality in terms of equal treatment of women and men, assuming symmetry of

position between women and men (Charlesworth 2005, 13).
Thus, although it may be perceived as progress that the UNHCR has adopted
mainstreaming, as research for this study suggests, the adoption of mainstreaming as
an approach may paradoxically lead to gender slipping off the agenda or becoming
blunted as it becomes dissolved within other concerns. Interviewees at the UNHCR
headquarters in Geneva pointed to the fact that, although mainstreaming could have
advantages in that it should remind all UNHCR employees of the need to consider
gender in all aspects of their work and not merely to relegate it as a separate womens
issue, in effect without the dedicated effort of an individual or group devoted to
bringing gender issues to the forefront of policies and programmes, these issues
might easily be ignored.4 They argued that many of those employed within the
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organization still ignored questions relating to gender equality or womens rights

and were sometimes reluctant to integrate these questions into their general work,
feeling that they had more important priorities.5 Thus, although gender
mainstreaming is an officially accepted target for the UNHCR, there is still a long
way to go before this mainstreaming really becomes effective and is transformed in
practice into equal protection for men and women asylum seekers and refugees.
There are still significant obstacles to promoting change within UNHCR which will
have a real impact on women on the ground (Hyndman 1998). The difficulties
involved in mainstreaming gender arise both from the nature of forced migration
and from national and international responses to it, including obstacles within the
organization of the UNHCR itself, as will now be discussed.

Refugee women: an unknown entity?

One of the difficulties in adopting and implementing policies to ensure equal
protection for men and women asylum seekers and refugees is the diversity of
situations implied by forced migrations, and the lack of accurate data on some
refugee populations. In fact, the lack of accurate gender-disaggregated statistics on
forced migrants has led some to overstate the proportion of women refugees in an
attempt to draw greater attention to their situation. Oosterveld, for example, claims
that The faces of refugees are overwhelmingly female: women and children
represent eighty per cent of the worlds twenty seven million refugees and displaced
people (Oosterveld 1996, 570). This type of claim is used to try to reverse the previous
invisibility of women in research and policy-making on asylum seekers and
refugees, and to press for further national and international action. However, a basic
problem with these statistics is that they conflate women and children6 into a single
category, thus obscuring even further the real nature of the statistical differences
between men and women. The amalgamation of women and children into one
category of vulnerable refugees is an important feature of the representations

4
Interviews with the author, 2005, 2006 and 2007.
5
Interviews with the author.
6
Cynthia Enloe has explained eloquently the ways in which the utilization of the
category womenandchildren acts to identify man as the norm against which all others can
be grouped together into a single leftover category, reiterating the notion that women are
family members above all, and allowing the state and international institutions to play a
paternalistic role in protecting these vulnerable women and children (Enloe 1993).
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 595

of women refugees in humanitarian actions, representations that can be argued to

have major impacts on the way in which gender is treated in issues of refugee
protection (Rajaram 2002). According to the UNHCR, women make up about half of
the total populations of concern to them. The statistical yearbook for 2006 states that
at the end of that year data broken down by sex were available for less than half of the
overall population of concernonly 13.9 million out of 32.9 million people, and that
of these roughly half were women, although the proportions varied greatly
depending on the refugee situation and the region of asylum (UNHCR 2007). Women
are the majority in some refugee camps resulting from mass influx situations
following civil wars and other conflict situations where men will be those principally
engaged in fighting and women will be more likely to flee. But, as Carpenter argues,
the category of women and children should not be used interchangeably with that
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of civilians, as in contemporary wars many men are civilians and women may also
be combatants (Carpenter 2006). On the other hand, women have historically been
less represented amongst those seeking asylum in industrialized countries. Statistics
that are available show that in Europe, for example, women make up only about one-
third of the total asylum claimants (Bloch et al 2000; Freedman 2007). This wide
diversity of situations of forced migration and the fact that in some cases the exact
nature of the populations is unknown make gender mainstreaming harder to
achieve. Mainstreaming gender involves both consideration of gendered inequalities
occurring among forced migrants and displaced persons within refugee camps and
of the inequalities arising in the process of claiming asylum within another state. For
the UNHCR this involves working both with their own organization, with numerous
NGOs involved in the management and daily running of refugee camps, and
negotiating with national governments about their particular asylum legislation and
policies. Although progress has undoubtedly been made in recognizing the
particular protection needs of women and in putting in place some programmes to
address these needs, this progress is somewhat random and there is still a failure to
take gender issues into account in all areas of refugee protection.

Internal constraints on gender mainstreaming

As argued above, pressure from womens groups led the UNHCR to adopt policy
and guidelines for the protection of women refugees, and since the early 1990s the
UNHCR has identified refugee women as a policy priority (UNHCR 1999).
Following the 1995 Beijing Conference, the UNHCR, like other UN agencies, has
adopted gender mainstreaming as the best way to achieve gender equality in its
policies. Despite this prioritization of concerns with women refugees and gender
issues in the asylum and refugee process, implementation continues to be slow
and ad hoc (Baines 2004, 1). Some of the difficulties in adopting a real gender-
mainstreaming approach have been a result of problems in defining mainstream-
ing, which is a notoriously contested concept as discussed above. Whilst the
definition adopted by most UN agencies and other development organizations
adheres closely to that provided by the UN Economic and Social Council in 19977, this

7
This definition is as follows: Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of
assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation,
policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making womens
 596 Jane Freedman

definition itself remains tricky to implement in practice, and during interviews

for this research it emerged that many UNHCR employees had rather vague
understandings of what mainstreaming actually means.
Success in implementing gender mainstreaming is also dependent on factors
within each institution. Moser and Moser (2005) identify five institutional features
that condition the extent of gender mainstreaming, namely, internal responsibility
(the importance of key individuals in promoting mainstreaming), organizational
culture, (male) resistance, mechanisms for accountability and gender training. In all
of these areas the UNHCR structures and organisations might be seen to contain
obstacles to mainstreaming. Thus the seeming inability to put into practice much of
the discourse on gender and women refugees must be seen in part as a result of
internal difficulties and crises in the UNHCRs own organization. Unlike most of
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the other UN agencies, it is an agency that is dependent on donor funding, with

up to 98 per cent of funds coming directly from national governments (Vayrynen
2001). These funds are renewed annually, creating a particular dependence on
donor states.8 This means that donor states can have a large degree of control over
the UNHCRs agenda, and in some cases the agency might be seen as prioritizing
these states interests over those of asylum seekers and refugees (Crepeau 1995;
Hammerstad 2000).9 In particular the contributions of the European Commission
and individual European states make up nearly half of the UNHCRs budget, thus
placing Europe in the position of a majority shareholder in the agency (Agier and
Valluy 2007). These pressures from states have led to what some have argued is a
change of direction by the UNHCR, moving from a function of protecting refugees
to one of controlling them in the interests of donor states. One sign of this has been
the promotion of the policy of voluntary returns which might be argued to be
more forced than voluntary (Preston 1999). Thus a function of containment of
humanitarian emergencies can be seen to have been added on to, or indeed to have
replaced, the UNHCRs primary functions of protecting refugees. Whilst some see
this new function of containment as an unwitting complicity of the UNHCR with
donor states (Barnett 2001), others have been more critical and have seen it as a
strategic positioning of the UNHCR to align its concerns with those of donor states,
particularly with regard to policies of externalization10 of asylum processes
(Agier and Valluy 2007). In these conditions, the policies followed by UNHCR must
resonate with the agendas of its donors, and particular issues such as introducing
gender mainstreaming may be pushed down the policy agenda of the organization
in favour of priorities more popular with the donors.
In addition, Vayrynen highlights the problem of earmarking of the UNHCRs
funds:

Footnote 7 continued
as well as mens concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design,
implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political,
economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not
perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.
8
The ten largest donors are in order the US, the European Commission, Japan, Sweden,
the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada.
9
See, for example, Agier and Valluys critiques of the UNHCRs role in European
policies for the externalization of asylum (Agier and Valluy 2007).
10
For a more detailed discussion of the externalization of asylum and its gendered
consequences see Freedman (2007), in particular, chapter six.
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 597

In UNHCR, problems have not concerned only the voluntary nature of funds, but
also the tendency of donors to earmark them. This means simply that conditions are
imposed on the use of funds . . . These conditions have usually required that monies
should be used for particular country programs. Such earmarking tends to create
inequities in the refugee regime as the main donors seem to favour crisis areas that
are geographically close to them and/or politically more important due to the
potential of cross-border instability or competition for influence with other powers.
(Vayrynen 2001, 156).

This earmarking of funds has had notable impacts in relation to the

comparative availability of funds for projects in Africa and in Eastern Europe,
African countries often falling to the bottom of the lists of priorities for donor
states (Vayrynen 2001). These motives for distribution of funding may have
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impacts on the UNHCRs ability to adequately fund activities and programmes

that aim to promote gender equality or to extend adequate protection to women
refugees. This is both because many of the women who are most in need of
protection find themselves in geographical regions that are not considered a
priority by donor states and so do not receive much funding, or because gender
equality programmes that are seen as long-term investments with often intangible
or only marginal results are not favoured by the UNHCR staff who have to decide
how the scarce budgets should be spent.
The UNHCR must also be viewed as a huge bureaucracy11 and one that holds
tremendous discursive and institutional power over refugees. This power can be seen
to take away possibilities of agency from refugees and displaced people, limiting their
participation in any form of planning, implementation or management of operations
(Baines 2004). This critique may be particularly relevant to operations designed to
overcome gender inequalities, which are often designed and implemented without
any input from women themselves as to what their needs or desires might be,
and which can be criticized for their framing of women merely in terms of their
vulnerability (Hyndman 1998; Indra 1999). The bureaucratic structure of the UNHCR
and the number of people it employs also mean that policies designed to promote
gender sensitivity and the enhanced protection of women refugees and asylum seekers
may not be adopted or implemented by some of its own staff. Although there are
clearly staff in the UNHCR who are committed to mainstreaming, it could be argued
that there are insufficient key individuals in positions of responsibility who are pushing
for mainstreaming. Some UNHCR employees interviewed for this study pointed to the
continued need to persuade and remind their colleagues (and in particular their male
colleagues) of the need to integrate a gendered approach into their work. They also
highlighted the problem that in much of the UNHCRs work in the field, and especially
in situations of extreme conflict and crisis, the majority of the protection officers are
male, and thus may not always be sensitive to gendered needs.12 This lack of female
staff, particularly in emergency situations and in dangerous areas, may be a result of the
deep structures of the organization which make little concession to the reconciliation
of work and family, as Rao and Kelleher have shown for other organizations (Rao and
Kelleher 2002).

11
By the mid-1990s UNHCR employed over 5000 staff worldwide.
12
Interviews with the author at UNHCR headquarters and in national bureaux in
Europe, 2005, 2006 and 2007.
 598 Jane Freedman

Evidence from different UNHCR bureaux in European countries also seems

to show that there are major variations in the extent to which the UNHCR
representatives in each country prioritize gender-mainstreaming policies. In France,
for example, NGOs and associations working to support asylum seekers noted
a real change in the UNHCRs involvement in inter-associational campaigns to
make the refugee status determination authorities more aware of gender equality
following the arrival of a new female senior protection officer who was committed
to the principles of gender mainstreaming.13 Similarly in Italy, the CIR (Consiglio
Italiano per i Rifugiati) pointed to the way in which a new female UNHCR senior
employee had had a significant impact in persuading the refugee status
determination commissions to adopt internal gender guidelines.14 Several other
national organizations and NGOs interviewed also noted the way in which the
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arrival of a UNHCR representative who was more committed to gender

mainstreaming in a national bureau could have a significant impact on national
policy.15 Although the UNHCR has only a limited role in refugee status
determination in industrialized states, and often merely an advisory capacity, the
presence of a senior UNHCR representative pushing for the adoption of more
gender-equal policies can therefore have an impact. It seems also, from the evidence
gathered, that female UNHCR staff are likely to be more aware and more responsive
to the demands of gender mainstreaming within their organization and within
asylum and refugee policies in general. Without wishing to advocate a position that
implies that only women can be sensitive to gendered aspects of policy-making and
implementation, it does seem that the balance of men and women working within an
organization will have some impact on the way in which gender is considered, and
that in the case of the UNHCR women are still under-represented both at higher
levels of the bureaucracy and in field operations.
A further characteristic of the UNHCRs organization which impacts on the
way in which gender issues are considered is the very hierarchical nature of the
organization, with a mistrust for anyone parachuted in from outside to senior
levels of management (Loescher 2001). Baines points to the way that this hierarchy
has disadvantaged some of the women appointed to the role of senior coordinator
for refugee women, who have been perceived as outsiders and have thus had
less authority within the organization (Baines 2004).

What progress in gender mainstreaming?

So what have been the substantial changes that have resulted from the UNHCRs
attempts to take more account of specific needs of refugee women and to integrate
and mainstream gender in its policy-making and activities in the last two decades?
In 2001, the Womens Commission for Refugee Women and Children carried out
an assessment of the results of ten years of implementation of the 1991 Guidelines on
the protection of refugee women (UNHCR 1991). This assessment concluded that the
Guidelines had succeeded in raising awareness among UNHCR staff and partners of
womens specific needs and interests, but that overall the implementation of the

13
Interviews with the author, 2007 and 2008.
14
Interview with the author, 2008.
15
For example, interviews in Belgium and Sweden.
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 599

Guidelines was uneven and incomplete, occurring on an ad hoc basis in certain sites
rather than in a globally consistent and systematic way (WCRWC 2002, 2). The
report cites barriers to implementation which include a lack of female UNHCR staff,
a serious obstacle both to obtaining information from refugee women and to
addressing the specific protection issues they face. It argues further that insufficient
participation of refugee women themselves in decision-making is also a serious
barrier to the full implementation of the Guidelines (WCRWC 2002). A consultation
exercise that the UNHCR organized with some refugee women came to similar
conclusions that, despite progress in some areas, women refugees often still lacked
access to food and other basic resources, and that they were not adequately protected
against sexual and gender-based violence. One issue raised was the continuing
failure to provide refugee women with their own personal documentation, such as
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their own food ration cards. The distribution of these cards to male heads of families
led to particular problems, as explained in the report:
Participants of the Dialogue and the local and regional consultations identified the
lack of personal documentation as a major problem facing displaced women. Even
when such documentation is provided, the refugee women reported that it is
usually only given to male heads of household. The distribution of food ration cards
to men only is a continued practice, despite the fact that dependence on male family
members often increases the protection problems women face. In the Pakistani
regional consultation, UNHCR staff was informed of this problem, and its severe
impact on the family, in a case where a ration card belonging to a deceased refugee
man was recalled, leaving his remaining four widows and twenty-five children
without access to food. Fortunately, refugee women eventually successfully lobbied
to have the ration card reinstated to the widows. Also, in places such as Guinea,
where individual ration cards were not provided, some refugee women and girls
were forced to exchange sex for food. Most refugee women participants agreed
that food would be distributed more evenly within families if ration cards were
distributed to refugee women and they were equal partners in the development and
implementation of food distribution strategies. (UNHCR 2001, 19).

The consultation also highlighted the way that women seeking asylum in
Western states did not feel that their specifically gendered experiences were taken
into account by decision-makers and judges. Finally the consultation exercise
criticized the way in which refugee women were often left out of camp planning and
decision-making processes. Women in Guinea, for example, felt they were left out of
planning, designing, implementing and even evaluating programmes for refugee
assistance (UNHCR 2001, 26). This exclusion of women from planning and
implementation was a contributing factor in the lack of access to basic resources.
Partially in response to these criticisms of the way in which gender was being
mainstreamed, the UNHCR launched a pilot Age, Gender and Diversity
Mainstreaming project in 2004 (UNHCR 2005). This project, piloted in eight
countries,16 aimed to ensure that staff in these countries would promote gender
equality and respect for the rights of refugee women and children; apply an age and
gender analysis to their operations; and operationalize policies relating to the
protection of refugee women and children (UNHCR 2005). A first analysis of these
pilot projects found mixed success in implementing the age, gender and diversity

16
Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Greece, India, Syria, Venezuela, Zambia.
 600 Jane Freedman

mainstreaming strategy, some countries progressing much further than others. These
variations were attributed to similar factors to those discussed above with respect
to UNHCR gender-mainstreaming operations, namely, ownership, leadership,
local office culture, gender balance, and skills in influencing and changing the
understanding and attitudes of colleagues (UNHCR 2005). These findings tally with
those revealed by the interview data gathered for this research project, particularly in
relation to the importance of leadership and local office culture, and in the problems
experienced with the ability of local UNHCR leaders to influence the understanding
of gender equality amongst their staff and cooperation partners (Freedman 2007;
2010).
Criticisms of the implementation of UNHCR policies on refugee women and on
gender are consistent with other analyses of UNHCRs actions in particular refugee
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situations in which they intervene. Many of the criticisms stem from an underlying
understanding and construction of the relationship between the refugee and the
UNHCR/NGO bringing aid as one between helper and victim, with no possibility
of collaboration as equals being envisaged. Relations of power which start off as
highly unequal may be made even more so by the way in which aid is administered.
In the context of management of refugee camps, for example, UNHCR and other aid
agencies have been criticized for promoting unequal power relations between aid
workers and refugees and for encouraging types of dependent behaviour on the part
of refugees (Harrell-Bond 2002; Hyndman 2000). It is argued that the nature of
aid given out develops a patronclient relationship within which powerful and
competent aid workers distribute aid to the helpless refugees. Even the conditions
in which refugees tell their stories and register their claims for protection with the
UNHCR authorities in a camp can be seen as reinforcing power inequalities. Often
they may be forced to wait hours in a queue in the sun before gaining access to a
UNHCR official. And when they do get access to a UNHCR official to relate their
stories, they are themselves frequently forced into a re-affirmation of their victim
status. As Ratner comments, refugees often feel the need to tell stories about their
own powerlessness in order to gain certain advantages from UNHCR officials or
from other aid agencies, benefits such as extra food rations, child support or even
third-country resettlement (Ratner 2005). This re-appropriation of stories of
powerlessness and victim status can be seen as a form of agency on the part of
refugees who adapt their strategies for survival to the dominant representations
created by those providing aid to them: The refugees have to tell stories of
powerlessness to invest in their future and ironically, the disempowering
experiences that got them in their hopeless situations in the first place, become a
strategic tool for survival in the form of a utilitarian narrative that is far from a
powerless act (Ratner 2005, 19).
These unequal power relationships within which refugees are constructed as
vulnerable or helpless victims may have particular resonance in the case of women
refugees, reinforcing gendered constructions of womens powerlessness and lack of
agency in certain societies. We will discuss below the way in which representations of
refugee women have perpetuated particular understandings and constructions of
the specificities of these womens situations which may serve to essentialize womens
experiences and to diminish the understanding of the differences in their positioning
dependent on class, ethnicity, age and other factors. As with other refugees, however,
women may in fact exercise a very particular kind of agency in re-appropriating and
mobilizing these representations for their own benefit. Thus the way in which they
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 601

are treated as victims may be used to facilitate their own personal survival
strategies. In some camps, for example, women may actively use stories of sexual
violence that they have experienced as a pragmatic strategy for improving their own
situation (Ratner 2005).
However, despite these possibilities of re-appropriation of the discourse of
victimization to further personal survival strategies, the overall effect of the
highly unequal relationships between the UNHCR and refugees has been that of
removing refugees from the decision-making and planning processes concerning
the organization of their lives and their protection. This is in many cases
particularly problematic for women, as they are generally already positioned in a
subordinate position with relation to these processes in their own societies, and so
relationships with the UNHCR and other aid agencies can act to reinforce local
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gender inequalities and mechanisms of domination. Further, important physical

and material barriers may exist to womens participation in planning, such as lack
of childcare facilities to enable them to participate in meetings. Unless all of these
factors are taken into consideration by UNHCR staff, gender equality in any
camp-planning programmes will remain illusory.
Another explanation for the difficulties in implementation of the UNHCRs
gender policies and programmes in refugee camp situations is highlighted by Baines
and Harrell-Bond, who point to the way in which goals of cultural sensitivity may
undermine efforts to implement gender equality policies. Harrell-Bond points
particularly to the way in which the aim of cultural sensitivity has led humanitarian
agencies to encourage traditional methods of solving disputes within refugee
camps. This method of favouring traditional methods of negotiation and arbitration
can reinforce the power of those already dominant in any society or population
and can give licence to many kinds of oppression by the camp elders (Harrell-Bond
1999). As these elders are generally older men, their judgements may well reinforce
unequal gender relations among refugee populations. Baines also points to the way
in which resistance to gender equality policies within the UNHCR has sometimes
stemmed from the ideal of universalism which is used to deny the validity of treating
women as a separate category. This type of recognition can be associated with
privileging one group over another in a zero-sum game (Baines 2004, 63). In parallel
with this claim to universalism, however, exists a discourse that locates the roots of
gender inequality and practices of domination or oppression within the realm of the
cultural values and norms of the country of origin or of the host society: Gender
equality then, is regarded by some staff as a cultural imposition, undermining the
principle of non-intervention embedded in UNHCR culture. That gender equality is
perceived to be a Western-feminist imposition is defended by staff who maintain a
certain cultural relativism in their belief systems, despite their loyalty to principles of
universality (Baines 2004, 63).
This sometimes paradoxical parallel belief both in the value of universalism and
in the need to respect other cultures is repeated in other areas of refugee protection,
notably in refugee status determination procedures, which at the same time often
refuse to treat women as a specific category because the theoretically gender-neutral
laws and policies should apply to all equally, and at the same time attribute much of
the persecution suffered by women to cultural difference which is then interpreted
as a justification for non-intervention on the basis that it is wrong to interfere with
other cultures. There have been notable cases where women seeking asylum on the
basis of feared female genital mutilation (FGM) or forced marriage have been refused
 602 Jane Freedman

protection by refugee status determination authorities on the grounds that these

practices form a normal part of the culture of their country of origin, and that the
majority of women in this country of origin are subject to such practices (Freedman
2007; 2010).
The mixed results of the UNHCRs attempts to integrate a gender dimension into
its policies and programmes can thus be traced back to a variety of causes, including
the structure of the organization and its institutional culture, the policies of donor
governments, and the dominant representations of refugees which have been created
by the UNHCR and other humanitarian aid agencies. Within these constraints there
are certainly individuals who are working hard to try to ensure that the goals of
gender equality are met, but these efforts may go unrewarded when faced with the
difficulties of implementing policies and programmes to promote gender equality
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within various contexts of refugee protection.

Representations of the refugee

Underlying all of the above discussion on the ways that the UNHCR has or has not
succeeded in mainstreaming gender in refugee protection is the issue of dominant
representations, which both portray women refugees as helpless victims and
reinforce the difference between us and them, Western women and the racialized
other. This division can be traced back to a primary dichotomy that has been
established in international politics between those states which produce refugees
and those which accept refugees (Macklin 1995). Following on from the logic of the
Cold War period when the countries of the Western bloc believed that refugees all
emanated from the other side of the Iron Curtain, and that political persecution could
not happen in their countries, democratic Western states since the Cold War have
assumed that they cannot produce refugees, as they have laws and policies designed
to protect the human rights of their citizens. The refugee-producing countries are
others, countries that do not respect human rights in the same way. The problems
inherent in this type of distinction are evident from the discussion of gender-related
persecution and particularly of domestic violence in research on gender and asylum.
Whilst domestic violence occurs in all countries, the connection is rarely established
between violence against women here in the West and violence against women over
there in other countries. As a result the persecutions that take place in those other
countries are attributed to immutable social and cultural characteristics, and the real
dynamics of gender inequality underlying all types of gender-related violence,
whether here or there, are not analysed. As Macklin argues,
Recent feminist scholarship from the United States on gender persecution and
refugee status evinces a distressing degree of cultural hyperopia regarding local
conditions for women. It seems that when some North American feminists want to
make a pitch for granting asylum to victims of gender persecution elsewhere, they
become tactically blind to the compelling evidence gathered by other North
American feminists documenting local practices that might constitute gender
persecution. At the very moment North American feminists turn to condemn
misogyny in the third world, they lose sight of the fact that our own culture hardly
presents a model of gender equality. (Macklin 1995, 267)

These types of ethnocentric and racializing attitudes may make it easier for
feminists in the West writing about asylum and refugees to identify some kinds
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 603

of practices as persecution, whilst others are not so easily recognized. FGM, a practice
that is held up as a paradigm of other cultures, has been the subject of many feminist
campaigns. Far fewer women have mobilized to support victims of domestic
violence in other countries, or indeed have suggested that victims of domestic
violence in Western states should themselves be able to seek international protection
or asylum elsewhere. This othering of cultural practices and of women seeking
asylum leads to a tendency to disconnect the experiences of Western women from
those of women who seek asylum. As Macklin again argues,
What this means in the refugee context is that we suppress the commonality of
gender oppression across cultures to ensure that what is done to Other women
looks too utterly different from (or unspeakably worse than) what is done to women
here, that no one would notice a contradiction in admitting them as refugees. The
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logic of the dichotomy of refugee-acceptor/refugee-producer compels a parallel

classification of Western woman/Other woman that serves to facilitate the
admission of at least some women fleeing gender persecution, but only by adopting
a method that is politically and empirically problematic. (Macklin 1995, 272)

How can this problematic dichotomy be overcome without, in the process,

reverting to a false universalism that ignores divisions among women produced by
race, class or ethnicity? The answer must be to consider the local and international
contexts carefully when examining what is persecution against women, and what
can be done to help women seeking asylum or women refugees. In seeking to
understand obstacles to the achievement of gender equality in refugee protection it
is also necessary to examine critically the global norms that have been created, and the
frames that are used to represent women refugees and asylum seekers. It might
be argued that one of the reasons for the uneven impact of global norms in this area
is that they are based on frames that represent women refugees principally as
vulnerable victims, thus essentializing a particular set of gendered roles, and failing
to take into account the underlying gendered relations of power. Representations
of refugee women as helpless victims also act to depoliticize these womens
experiences and activities (Baines 2004). Rajaram (2002) points to the way in which
humanitarian responses to refugees amount to a generalizing and depoliticized
depiction of these refugees as helpless victims. Refugees are thus rendered
speechless and without agency, and, as Malkki argues, they are identified not
in terms of their individual humanity but as a group whose boundaries and
constituents are removed from their historical context and reduced to norms relevant
to a state-centric perspective of international relations (Malkki 1996). This
depoliticization can be argued to be particularly acute with regard to women
refugees and asylum seekers, as women tend to embody a particular kind of
powerlessness in the Western imagination (Malkki 1995), and are thus idealized as
victims without agency.
This use of strategic frames of women as vulnerable victims in need of protection
is prevalent amongst practitioners in the international policy community (Carpenter
2005), and it can be argued that the symbols and signifiers of women as vulnerable
victims form a valuable part of the cultural tool kit (Swidler 1986) of these
practitioners. Images of women and children in refugee camps have become
common in fundraising campaigns by the UNHCR and NGOs. In some contexts
these images have been shown to be highly effective in raising public awareness of
refugee issues, and in attracting donor support for particular humanitarian crises,
 604 Jane Freedman

or in drawing the attention of political leaders. In Somalia, for example, Loescher

comments on the way that widespread media coverage of starving women and
children finally turned policy makers attention to the disaster (Loescher 2001, 303).
However, although such framings might be assumed to be beneficial to women,
as they are supposed to be used to mobilize support for specific protection measures
for women, these frames are in fact essentializing of gender difference and ignore
womens agency and voice. Women refugees and asylum seekers are, for example,
often symbolized as mothers, and in this framing their primary role is to protect their
children. Examples of the use of such a frame can be found in asylum policies in
various countries which have sought to protect women whose children are at risk of
excision. In this case, protection is offered to women purely in their function as
mothers protecting their innocent children from harm (the mobilizing power of
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ideas of innocence and harm have been discussed above). A different way to
approach this problem of the essentializing nature of the frames used to describe
women asylum seekers and refugees, and of the framing of particular issues of
persecution in terms of pre-existing and essentializing norms, is to relate these
problems to the question of how gender issues become (or do not become) securitized
and the fact that asylum-seeking women themselves are often excluded from the
process of framing their own claims, because they lack a voice. In a critique of the
Copenhagen School, Hansen uses the example of honour killings in Pakistan to argue
that those who are constrained in their ability to speak about their security/insecurity
are prevented from becoming subjects worthy of consideration and protection
(Hansen 2000, 285). She concludes that Silence is a powerful political strategy that
internalizes and individualizes threats thereby making resistance and political
mobilisation difficult (Hansen 2000, 306). This critique might serve as the basis of a
wider criticism of the ways in which the voice of women asylum seekers and refugees
is ignored in the framing of issues relating to gender specific persecution.
The discursive opportunities that exist are not open to these women for reasons of
political, social and economic marginalization and exclusion. The NGOs and
associations that make claims for gender-specific policies and legislation do so on
behalf of refugee and asylum-seeking women, but these women themselves have
little or no voice in the process. Speaking for women asylum seekers and refugees
leads to representations and framings of them which rely heavily on pre-existing
cultural norms, as argued above, and which contain these women in their role of
victims. Real understanding of the gendered causes of forced migration would take
into account the voices and perspectives of those women who flee, and would adapt
solutions for protection to specific experiences and to particular national and local
contexts.

Conclusion
A goal of feminist constructivist analysis must be to give a voice to those
considered marginal in international politics (Locher and Prugl 2001). As Steans
and Ahmadi conclude,
Agreements on principles or statements of good intent are of little use if they are
not followed up with implementation and enforcement measures or if they are
undermined, subsumed or spoken for only by elites. Impediments to womens
participation in decision making processes remain, while practices of inclusion and
 Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection 605

exclusion in relation to NGOs . . . also silence womens voices. (Steans and Ahmadi
2005, 244).
If the interests of women fleeing persecution and seeking protection as refugees
are truly to be guaranteed, then the voice of these women needs to be heard. It is
important to listen to the voices of women seeking asylum and women refugees
if the trap of essentializing their experience and treating them as passive victims
is to be avoided. Women do need protection and are vulnerable in some
circumstances, but this should not be generalized to assume that they are all just
vulnerable victims. Cockburn argues that women should only be treated as
mothers, as dependents or as vulnerable when they themselves ask for this
special treatment. When, on the contrary, should they be disinterred from the
family, from women and children, and seen as themselves, womenpeople,
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even? Ask the women in question. They will know (Cockburn 2004, 29).

Notes on contributor
Jane Freedman is a Professor at the Universite de Paris 8 and researcher at the
Centre dEtudes Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris, France.

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